-
Notifications
You must be signed in to change notification settings - Fork 0
1.6.4 Other Search Operators
Search operators are characters you include when you’re entering your search terms into the search window to narrow your search results. (The power search prefixes described previously are search operators specific to stori.es.) The search operators described below are not unique to stori.es. You can use these operators with the same results in many commonly used search engines. Learning about them will help you get the most out of the stori.es platform.
All of the operators described in this section help you search across the entire database of stories. You can also use them in combination with power search prefixes to create complex searches to further hone your results.
- Search for Any Specified Keyword
- Search for Exact Matches
- Search for Partial Matches to Keywords
- Fuzzy Keyword Search
- Proximity Keyword Search
- Requiring and Excluding Keywords
- Search for Multiple Keywords
Punctuation in Search. Most punctuation you type into the search window is ignored by the search engine. However, there are some symbols and punctuation marks that work as operators within a search.
To find stories which contain any of the specified keywords, such as credit or debt, use the OR operator:
credit OR debt
If you’re searching for content that exactly matches a specific phrase, wrap it in double quotes. The double quotes operator returns content that contains text that appears in the exact same order as what you include within the double quotes (but the search is case-insensitive). For example:
“credit card debt”
...would produce results identical to:
“CREDIT CARD debt”
If you’re searching for content that partially matches a phrase, use the asterisk operator. For example, to match any word that begins with telecom, append an asterisk to the word fragment:
telecom*
The search returns any content that contains the fragment, such as the words telecoms and telecommunications.
Tip: The asterisk operator works at the beginning and in the middle of words too:
*ded (matches “decided”, “handed”, etc.)
dec*ded (matches “decided”)
Using the tilde operator lets you perform a fuzzy keyword search, that is, it lets you search for keywords that are similar in spelling. By appending a ~ sign (the tilde operator) to the end of a keyword, you instruct stori.es to search not only for the target keyword, but also similarly spelled words. (It's called a fuzzy keyword search because it's as if you’re looking at the keyword out of focus.) You’re looking for similarly appearing words. For example:
roam~
...would match terms such as “roams” or “foam.”
Tip: You can hone in on how similar you’d like the match to be by appending a value from 0.0 (not very similar) to 1.0 (very similar) after the tilde operator. For example:
roam~0.9
...would match roams but likely not foam. If you do not explicitly specify a value, a default value of 0.5 is applied.
A proximity keyword search lets you search for pairs of keywords that are located some distance apart from one another in the target content. To perform this search, wrap the two target keywords in double quotes as if you’re defining an exact match. Then add the tilde operator and append an integer number describing the maximum distance apart you’d like the target keywords to be. For example:
“decided download”~1 searches for decided and download a maximum of one word apart, thus matching decided to download
“decided download”~2 would look for decided and download a maximum of two words apart, and would thus also match decided not to download
To require that a search term be present for content to be considered a match, prefix the search term with a plus sign:
+tag:positive Shows stories that include the tag positive.
Conversely, to require that a search term not be present for content to be considered a match, prefix the search term with a minus sign.
-tag:positive Shows stories that do NOT include the tag positive.
As we explained in Basic Search, by default search finds stories that contain all of the specified keywords you type in the search window.
The AND operator also returns all content that contain all of the specified keywords. Because it is the default operation performed when you search on multiple keywords, it’s usually not necessary to explicitly include the AND operator when performing a simple search for multiple keywords. For example, the two searches below yield the exact same results:
credit debt
...is the same as typing:
credit AND debt
However, the AND operator is useful if you want to make sure the search results exclude items that do not include all terms.